Internet: SEO

We recently signed up for Traffic Blazer with GoDaddy for a domain just to see what happens and it appears that they submit your domains to a bunch of link harvesters, random search engines, indexes, etc. all which to me seemed pretty useless. From what we saw it isn’t going give you PageRank and it isn’t going to generate you that much useful traffic.

You can buy traffic, specifically impressions, and those impressions may generate a few clicks and a few clicks will only generate a few click-troughs that in turn will only generate you a very tiny number of conversions which at that point you must to convert to paying clients.

The conversion ratio on low demand professional services type work (like I do) seems to ALWAYS be less than n<0.01% (1 in 10,000) of total impressions.

There are a couple of things that I would do right away if you haven’t already.

Make sure that you are using a statistics package that is at least as good as Google Analytics it will teach you a lot about your site.

Map your keywords, phrases etc. with AdWords Traffic Estimator and the Adwords Tools

Validate and clean up your site with Google Webmaster Tools and a robots.txt to make sure that Google and other search engines are reading your site as cleanly as possible.

There are analogous tools for the other search engines to those I listed above. At this point the most important thing that will benefit you is updating your content, getting linked to from other high PR sites (not link harvesters, but sites with HIGH PAGERANK – PR7, PR8, PR9) and last but also the very most important, time – the length your site has lived on the web is one of the most important factors, unfortunately it isn’t something that we can control.

*Note: Also watch to see how things you do affect your PageRank, I use SEOBook’s ‘SEO For Firefox‘ tool for Firefox to watch my PageRank and inbound links. Another tool that I find interesting is SocialMeter.

Useful Links:

• Adwords Traffic Estimator – https://adwords.google.com/select/Login
• AdWords Keyword Tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• Google Webmaster Tools – http://www.google.com/webmastertools
• Google Site Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics
• SEOBook – http://www.seobook.com
• On Google PageRank – http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
• PageRank by Sergey and Larry – http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

I also have to remember who my web site is for sometimes. Those who benefit most from it are those who I have told “go read about technology support or about us on my web site.“ Those are people who are in the conversion process to becoming paying clients and they are the most important to me so I focus on having a site that caters to them. My site will never generate me leads because of the nature of my product, the web is probably working harder for you then I in this case. So I use it for educating to make the sale, not generating the lead.

Sorry I didn’t get back to you earlier; I hope you find this information useful. The web is a really interesting place to do business and honestly I feel that it benefits large corporations selling high volumes of product much more than the small business.

The small business benefits by having a functional business card and supporting information about their business and products. It is so important that we educate our potential clients about our unique products as small businesses, letting them know that our products and unique to our businesses and our businesses are designed and have adapted to the climate and demographics that we operate.